Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai is an example of the circularity of film genres in the world cinema. Kurosawa was influenced in his samurai films by the motifs and icons of the American Western film, which was very popular in Japan as elsewhere, and in turn his Seven Samurai would become an influence on later American Westerns, notably the remake of Seven Samurai, The Magnificent Seven. A comparison of the two films, though, shows very different aesthetic attitudes and also very different industry structures. The Kurosawa film is an ensemble piece in which the director shapes the movement of the film like an epic ballet, while the American version is structured more as a star vehicle with a number of individual star turns to appeal to different segments of the audience.
Noel Burch notes that Japanese cinema is fundamentally different from the dominant form in Western cinema, and some of the differences are evident in comparing these two films. In spite of the fact that the John Sturges Western uses Seven Samurai as its source material, the underlying themes are different, and the script develops the seven fighters in a different way as well.
Westerners tend to view the samurai film as a form of Western because that is an easy way to categorize the films and because there are elements of similarity. Of course, the most obvious of these is that they are set in Japan's past as the Western is set in America's, but there are basic differences even in this element. The past of the Western is a frontier past as America moved toward the West, and always there is a sense of conquering the wilderness and carving out a new homeland as an underlying motif. The samurai period was different for Japan. For one thing, Japan did not have a frontier and was never that large a country. It was certainly more rural than it would become later, but neither the samurai nor the people they either served or protected were pioneers or explorers...